Nate Marshall is a white supremacist from Colorado or Nate Marshall is a poet from the South Side of Chicago or i love you Nate Marshall when i first made my name Nate i was a boy at summer camp looking for cool in the muggy shadow & so when the white boys snipped Nathaniel to just a touch of the tongue to the mouth roof it seemed to me a religious moment, a new confirmation as okay. this was 2000 & you must have been Nate Marshall for decades by then. i find you, years later, buried in a google search & follow you silently for the next year like a high school crush. i tell my students about you the day when we wonder what if privilege hadn't put us in a college classroom. i tell my ex about you in bed & it's convenient that there's this other Nate Marshall to be the liar lying there this time. i see your failed campaign & watch how your ties to white supremacists spelled your demise. my Black history month paper on the Black Panthers in 3rd grade wouldn't color me radical enough & i am ashamed i've never been pushed out of a spotlight for loving my people too much. your day job is roofing & i just watch HGTV in hotels. you are the truer amongst us Nate. you, peddler of propaganda & seller of shingles. can you show me to love how you love? every time i've said what's good nigga it's possible we've matched our mouths, symmetrical around the two g's in the middle. i won't lie to you Nate Marshall or to myself Nate Marshall i too have hated a nigga & lived to tweet the tale. i too have sat suspicious in my basement wondering who was coming for my country. i too have googled myself & found a myself i despise. once, you left Twitter after i told my people to tell you that they loved you & your book & your commitment to Black people & i feel you Nate Marshall. i've left places & loves when they told me they loved a Nate Marshall i didn't recognize. another Nate Marshall origin story so, for the purposes of this story let's say turn of the 20th century my great grandfather Marshall disappeared so thoroughly nobody know what he looks like. so let's say he's super high yellow so much so maybe he's swarthy if he stays out of sun & so in this story he drops my grandpops & then pulls out of Mississippi to step west & stretch his legs as a white man. so let's say he has a whole white family with a little boy. & let's say he overcorrects cuz he knows the color the boy carries without knowing so he tells the little boy we don't associate with those people & that little boy has a whole lineage who don't talk to those people. so, maybe the name Marshall is just a passing story we'll never uncover. maybe he secret Black like a Hollywood actor. but maybe he knows & wants his name back & his body too. my daddy's daddy's daddy or the etymology of Marshall or a blank space or a space filled or a filled job or a job vacant or a vacant lot or a lot of questions or a question posed or a 'posed to & ain't or a ain't known or a known forgotten or a forgotten name or a name left or a left us. another Nate Marshall origin story again the white me on the internet appears & this time he wants what is his. our name is a country he claims for himself. you need to quit using my name. it is not your name. you are fake! i am Nate Marshall. you are filth! Nate Marshall calls Nate Marshall all this. every Nate Marshall i know has an unruly name a word he can't trace back. one Nate Marshall deletes himself. every Nate Marshall i know is mistaken. how to pronounce Nathaniel the southern folk say the a out long ways pull it apart so the syllables hang loose as laundry on the clothesline. the schools i went to, top ranked & unimaginative, make it obvious, unimpressive, a stub of an uh sound compact & efficiently packaged. my mama says it how she always has but i can never remember her intonation. this little blip, where I forget my self. beloved, how you say it though, that's the way it's said. i know when you say me like i'm an incantation i know i ain't no lie. another Nate Marshall origin story when the obscure meaning of the name is no longer an unreachable itch the mouth will fall away, both plump lips will dry & drop from the stupid face. imagine this, a man made donut, chest open, hollow, everything poured out, available, nowhere to drum a warning, no place to keep out. perhaps our rage at the other is just the way we fill what we don't know about ourselves. Excerpted from Finna: Poems by Nate Marshall All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
